In addition to Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy, Samuel Farber has written four books on Cuba taking up the theme of socialist democracy there: Revolution and Reaction in Cuba, 1933-1960 (Wesleyan University Press, 1976), The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (University of North Carolina Press, 2006), Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959: A Critical Assessment (Haymarket Books, 2011), and The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice (Haymarket Books, 2016). See my review of The Politics of Che Guevara in ATC 185.

E.H. Carr's three-volume The Bolshevik Revolution (Norton, 1985) is a sympathetic history of the period covered in Before Stalinism. Its main limitation is that in recounting what happened it can seem to argue that what happened must have happened. Readers must add their own critique.